A Landmark Reawakened: Michigan Central Station

Designed by the same firms that drew up New York's Grand Central Terminal, the 1913 Michigan Central Station has fallen into disrepair. But in our 2025 vision of Detroit, MCS is a thriving hub with small businesses and public spaces.

Shuttered in 1988 and marred by vandalism and graffiti, Michigan Central Station (MCS) once provided glaring evidence of Detroit's lost grandeur and rococo decay. But decades of talk about razing the landmark 1913 building fell silent in 2012, and those who clung to the belief that it could be restored were proved right. In 2025, flourishing gardens, the handiwork of citizen volunteers, welcome visitors to this once-derelict train station that has morphed into a multipurpose magnet. Tourists visit, staying in the stylish MCS W Hotel. Locals work in the building's office space, and people of every stripe gather here for concerts on the outdoor stage, for picnics and flea markets, for the skate park, for the shops, art gallery, and restaurants, and for the heart-stopping views from the rooftop dome and terrace.

Other American cities have restored landmarks like MCS. Both St. Louis and Kansas City, Mo., transformed their train stations into multiuse structures. Mass MoCA, a major contemporary and performing arts center in North Adams, Mass., was once a deserted collection of industrial buildings.

Those examples informed the remaking of MCS, but they weren't an exact blueprint. While devising the renovation, Elisabeth Knibbe, an Ann Arbor, Mich.—based architect, insisted that a piece of the grim past remain intact. When visitors enter the station today, they can look to the right and see a portion of the building in its prerestoration state—grimy and crumbling, an intentional reminder. "It's important to understand and remember our history," Knibbe says of that blighted fragment of the otherwise pristine building. "It's a symbol to everybody of how far Detroit went down—and how we came back."

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